The SWISH Report

A sixth report from the South Waziristan Institute of Strategic Hermeneutics to the al-Qaida Strategic Planning Cell on the progress of the campaign.

Thank you for inviting us to deliver a further report on the progress of your movement. You will recall that our work for your planning cell commenced with an initial assessment in July 2004, a follow-up in January 2005 and further reports in February 2006 and September 2006. Because of your concerns over the outcome of the United States mid-sessional elections to Congress in November 2006 you asked us to present an additional report, which we did in December.

We understand that you appreciate that we are a consultancy and will work for a range of customers. Before our last report, we had undertaken work for a unit in the British prime-minister's office (May 2005) and one in the US state department (September 2005). We understand that this did not cause you any concern, not least because our advice to both of those parties was comprehensively ignored.

Since our last report to you 12 months ago, we must inform you that we undertook a study for Gordon Brown's transition team at 11 Downing Street, (May 2007) shortly before he replaced Tony Blair. You may wish to know that only in one respect has our advice been followed - United Kingdom troops have been withdrawn to the outskirts of Basra - but in all other respects there has been little change.

Your aims and your concerns

We understand that the more immediate aims of your movement remain largely unchanged. They are:

-the expulsion of crusader forces from the region, especially those of the "far enemy" - the United States
-the termination of the House of Saud and its replacement with a genuine Islamist regime
-the termination of other pro-western and elitist regimes, not least the Mubarak regime in Cairo
-the establishment of a Palestinian state and the end of the Zionist entity
-support for legitimate Islamist movements in southern Thailand, Chechnya and elsewhere.

When we say "more immediate aims," we do appreciate that this is a relative matter. You seek and expect to achieve these aims over a period of decades rather than years. You then have the longer term aim of a region-wide caliphate, though this may take from 50 to 100 years. Your timescales are therefore entirely different to those of your enemies, though the latter continue to exhibit little or no understanding of this.

In terms of your more immediate aims, the one shift of direction that we detect is a belief within your planning circles that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have all become more prominent as early candidates for regime change.

In our discussions with your local representative in Wana, we understand that you are interested in our analysis of the outcome of the 2006 mid-sessional elections in the United States, the nature and effects of the "surge" in Iraq, and the prospects for your movement in relation to the possible results of the 2008 presidential election, now less than a year away.

You appear to have particular concerns about the impact of the surge and whether it will lead to a substantive reduction or even a complete withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. You are far less concerned about current developments in Afghanistan and Pakistan where you see the prospects for your movement as being the best for some years.

Iraq

We have to confess to being surprised at your concern over Iraq since the vaunted "success" there of the George W Bush administration is largely a construct. We would, moreover, have drawn that conclusion even before the numerous bombings and increase in violence of the past week.

Could we point to aspects of the surge which you appear to hav